There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.
KAZUO ISHIGUROI started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I’ve always seen my stories as enlarged songs.
More Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes
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The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
And I’m a Hailsham student – which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
There’s still a part of me that thinks I have to write a really good novel. I’m not trying to say I’m not happy with the novels I’ve written in the past. But it always feels to me like there’s another one that I have to write that will really say what I want to say, and really paint this world that I can see hazily in my head.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
If you are under the impression you have already perfected yourself, you will never rise to the heights you are no doubt capable of.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
She always wanted to believe in things.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I’ve always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
It is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
Even the solitude, I’ve actually grown to quite like. I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I’ll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I think there is a huge difference between writers who have very big sales, and writers who have small sales. Even writers with very high reputations, even Nobel prize winners, often sell in very low figures.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
What I’m not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it’s probably because I’m looking at them in the light of what came later.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you’re going to write before you die.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator’s memories and thoughts.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
KAZUO ISHIGURO -
I don’t think it’s any fun, even if you are one of the most respected authors in the world like Margaret Atwood, to keep being nominated and not win.
KAZUO ISHIGURO